Never Shaken

I’ve loved you more than you ever loved me —
No, don’t suggest your love’s as deep as mine:
Would you have died in endless misery
If I left you? You’d carp, complain, and whine —
But never mind; just take the adulation,
And remember how I grovelled here
That time when you succumbed to your temptation,
Living life with neither grace nor fear.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I’m willing to forget the past, and hope
That when you do feel sadness, when you’re moved
To wonder what will happen, how you’ll cope,
You’ll know my love will hold through any storm,
And at the edge of doom I’ll keep you warm.

Free of You

So when will I be free of you, sweetheart?
You can’t really believe you need a gun
To rid yourself of somebody you shun;
No need for you to fire a poison dart,
Display my shortcomings in works of art,
Or secretly pose as a restless nun
And stab my kidney. You already won,
And I’ll be over you, soon as we part.

I think we’re done here, or as near as dammit.
I’m done for, right? Time to abandon me
Beside the road, under a willow tree
Like the victims in a book by Dashiell Hammett.
No need to find the victim now: I am it,
Splayed out, played out, and made redundant, free.

A Forgotten History

Good-bye, old Bishop Mountain, and hello
De la Montagne, and Édouard Montpetit.
We were a not-by-much minority
When I grew up in Montreal. Just so,
I duly learned the French tongue, blow by blow,
But by the time my Dad was forty-three
We’d gone: Saint Louis (no, not Saint Louis);
No more Duplessis and Jean Béliveau.

I try to manage without losing tact,
But I remember childhood, every day,
How I felt we had been driven away,
Though, as an Anglophone, I still react
To each cool reminder of the French fact.
Ici je vois une histoire oubliée.

The Plinking Sound

He said, “This time you’re in the line of fire.”
I answered, “And you’re standing next to me;
I hope you’re in your best flame-proof attire.”
He laughed, “Sure, with a banjo on my knee.”
“Great! Play that banjo, and they’ll aim at you,
’Cause everybody hates that plinking sound.”
“Not everyone,” he argued. I laughed, too,
And countered, “I say only what I’ve found.”
We stopped laughing. The shooting had begun,
There was no banjo, and no sound like it,
And by the time the gunfire was all done
We both were lying in a bloody pit.
Still, as the blood was neither his nor mine,
We pondered, smiled, and took one glass of wine.